> You will want to analyze your disk and network layout for the machine and hosts though. All of the standard hardware performace >data applies to an iSCSI target ie. number of disks, RAID levels etc... It would be ideal for your XCP hosts to have dual network >cards so that networking data is sent across different cables/switches then the SAN data.

I agree, no matter how you access the storage, the load generated by the applications needs to be supported by the speed and number of disks, and RAID level. We've gone through the pain of having issues with storage that seemed like they could be the iSCSI initiator, the SAN network or buffers on the iSCSI storage device.... when it turned out, we were simply overloading the IO capabilities of the disks.

Also, it seems I am reading that you can enable live migration on an XCP pool without an external storage device at all, using local storage in each host. Is that right?

How does that work?


My understand of shared storage is that one copy of the VM exists in a place accessible to the two hosts, so to do live migration the VM storage doesn't actually move.

Can someone point me to some documentation that explains how XenServer and XCP handle storage? It seems to be quite different than VMware.

Thanks,

Brett Westover